I just want to preface this by saying that I'm not looking for sympathy, I'm very aware of how I was wrong in this situation, what I should have done and what I should do now. This is a situation I've been dealing with for the past 14 months or so, and haven't been able to speak to anyone about it. Literally never breathed a word of it to anyone, and I just need to let some stuff off my chest. This will probably be a long read, and may not make sense in parts, I'm very emotional right now and I'm just rattling stuff off as it comes to me. There's also probably more to this story, but a lot of what seems relevant to me may not be to someone on the outside, so I'll probably leave a bunch of stuff out.
Over a year ago now I started a new job. Nothing exciting, for a pretty small company looking to expand. The day I started, 2 other new people started along side me. One of this was a girl, we'll call her Sarah. I thought Sarah was cute, but I was in a relationship and she was married so I never thought of her as anything other than a colleague. We never spoke outside of work and I never thought of her outside of work unless it was for work reasons, but in work we got along really really well. We shared a desk and were basically in our own team, so we spoke to each other much more than we spoke to anyone else in the office. Around Halloween last year, I started developing a bit of a crush on her and started thinking about her a bit more, but nothing serious. I never even entertained the idea of doing anything about it or it leading to anything, because again we were both in long term relationships, and I just assumed it would pass eventually as crushes usually do.
Then the Christmas office party happened. The whole office went for dinner and drinks, management paid for everything. Later in the evening everyone was pretty drunk but all still in good spirits. At one point Sarah grabbed me by the hand and dragged me up to dance. There was a guy in a corner of the bar playing an acoustic guitar set, so we went over to him and started dancing. At one point she turned away from me to watch the guy play, so I just sort of stood there behind her drinking my pint. I'm not sure exactly when it started, but at a point I noticed that she had backed up into me and was rubbing her butt against my crotch. I sort of just froze, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't tell if she realised she was doing it or if she was just that drunk, but then she reached around and grabbed my hand and put it around her waist. I was shocked and again just sort of froze not really knowing what to do, then she turned around and pulled me in and kissed me. I kissed her back for a second or two then pulled away and said we shouldn't be doing this. She just looked up at me and gave me this smile that I can still see today and from that moment I was lost. I kissed her back. We spent most of the night kissing, in the bar, outside, in the lobby of her apartment building. She went upstairs to her apartment and I went home and that was that.
The next day I woke up to a message from her. We'd exchanged numbers pretty soon after we started working together but had never messaged each other before, it was really just in case of work stuff. We messaged for a bit about what had happened. I felt guilty and was really apologetic, but she seemed fine with it. Very much a "We were drunk, we only kissed, it's not a big deal, we're fine". I was relieved to hear her say that because she was the one that was married, so if she didn't think it was a big deal then that made me feel a bit better. That said, I'd never kissed anyone else in the entire 8 years I was with my partner, so I still felt guilty about that. I never told her, but about a week later I broke up with her. Not because of the kiss, the was more of a symptom than a cause. Things weren't great between us for a long time so I decided it was time to end it. I moved out and that was pretty much that.
Since that first message after the Christmas party, we began messaging constantly. All day every day, sometimes even in work while we were sitting next to each other. Around 2 weeks after the Christmas party, Sarah decided that she wanted to try and organise another round of drinks as there was a local beer market happening. I, sort of jokingly, suggested that it might be more fun if just the two of us went and she agreed. So the plan was for us to go for a few drinks on Friday after work, just the two of us. On Thursday, she came in to work and was clearly sick. Her daughter had just gotten over the chicken pox, and as Sarah had never had them as a child, she seemed to have picked them up. No spots or anything yet, just feverish and stuff. She worked from home on Friday and while she still wanted to go for drinks, didn't want to go out into a public place with chicken pox in case she spread them around so I suggested I grab a bottle of wine and call round to her apartment (Her husband had flown to a different city that day to spend Christmas with his mum, Sarah was due to join him the next day).
Round at her apartment we spent hours chatting, went through a couple of bottles of wine, and ended up kissing again. I think we both knew it was going to happen and we both wanted it to happen, but were just scared because of the obvious messiness of the situation. I decided I should go, because even though I wanted to kiss her I still felt guilty about it. About 5 minutes after I left she messaged me telling me how wet she was. I was, again, shocked but it was also incredibly hot. I told her that it sucked that I had to wait until I had to get home to masturbate and she replied saying she didn't have to wait and was about to start. After that, things really escalated between us.
We messaged constantly over the Christmas break, and when she came back and we were both in work, things started really heating up between us. We'd make excuses to go out for drinks at least once a week, a couple of times a week I'd drive her up to her daughters daycare and drop her off. Both were just excuses to sit and make out. We started sending each other sexually explicit texts in work. She'd go into the bathroom, take a photo of herself topless then wait until she was back at the desk before sending it to me just so she could see my reaction. We talked about sex constantly, what we wanted to do to each other, the fantasises we had about each other. We'd send nudes, videos of ourselves masturbating, mutual masturbation over video call when we could. We'd go into the bathrooms of the office, literally about 8ft away from our desk, to make out. One day we went for a walk to the shop on our lunch, and about halfway through the walk when no one was around she opened her coat to reveal that she wasn't wearing a top or bra underneath. It was all incredibly hot, and very exciting and everything was great for a few months.
Eventually, I started to realise that I was properly falling in love with her. I didn't know at the time if she felt the same, I had always gotten the vibe that from her this was purely sexual. But, it became clear over time that she had feelings for me too. Maybe not love, but she openly admitted that she had really strong feelings for me past just a crush. We talked constantly, openly about everything. I talked to her about things that even my partner of 8 years didn't know. We made each other laugh constantly, we just completely got each other. To use her words, we just really clicked" She'd talk to me about her husband, and occasionally mention things like him saying that the only reason they were still married was because they had a kid together. She talked about how she loved him, but she had loved other people in the past more than she loves him. I tried to not ask her too much about her relationship with her husband, both because I didn't feel like it was appropriate and also because I just didn't want to talk to the girl I was falling in love with about her husband. But from what she did say about him I always got the impression that they married because she fell pregnant and they felt like that was the right thing to do. Her especially, she comes from a background where having a child outside of marriage is very much looked down upon.
She tried to call things off a few times, not so much because she felt guilty, but because she was scared of her husband finding out. But, we always ended up back seeing each other again after a day or two. We just couldn't keep away from each other, made more difficult by the fact we spent 40 hours a week sitting next to each other. A couple of months ago, she made it clear that she really wanted to stop. I'd gotten her a card for a specific occasion, and her husband found it. He already knew I existed, and I think he was already a little jealous and suspicious of me, but he found the card and the note I'd written in it and called her out on it. There was nothing sexual or even romantic in the card, but the fact that I'd gotten her a card at all was enough for him challenge her. She denied that anything was happening, but then made it clear to me that things had to stop. I obviously didn't want to because at this point I was completely in love with her, but I understood. We still messaged as friends, but pretty much everything else had stopped. We still flirted, and on a couple of occasions we sexted but nothing physical happened between us since.
About 2 months ago now, she left the company we worked at. She got a much better job and although I was pretty down that I wasn't going to be seeing her every day, I was stoked for her getting a better position for much higher pay. Between leaving our company and starting a new one, there was about a one month gap where she was out of work. The day after she left, I called round to her apartment during my lunch hour and we chatted for ages about her leaving, what it mean, how it made us feel. It ended with me trying to kiss her, and her asking me not to. I can't really explain why I did. In the moment, I know she wanted me to kiss her, but she didn't at the same time. It's hard to explain. I know she wanted me to kiss her though, she hasn't outright denied that. Around 2 weeks ago, we were meeting up a lot. Her husbands mother was over and staying with them for a few week, her husband still had work during the day so she was looking for any excuse to leave the house. We went for pints, spent entire days together (I took PTO from work) and things were nice. One day she messaged me in the evening saying she felt really lonely after leaving me that day, and I felt the same. I know I was still in love with her, those feelings went away, and I was starting to feel that she still felt the same way about me.
Last Friday we went out as a group for drinks. A couple of people from the office, her and one other guy who had left for another company a couple of weeks prior. It was a good night, nothing happened, everyone just chatted and went home early enough. The next day we were messaging as normal, until some time in the late afternoon. I sent her a message and she didn't reply to it all evening. I didn't think much of it at the time, but when she still hadn't replied the next morning I thought that was weird. Normally she messages me pretty much as soon as she gets up. I set her a message in the afternoon asking if everything was ok, and she read it but didn't reply. I sent her another message that evening wishing her good luck in her new job (which she was starting the next day), and the next morning she still hadn't replied. At this point I was getting genuinely worried that something had happened to her. I sent her another message (Around 7:30am on Monday morning, the last message I'd received from her was around 3pm on Saturday) just saying "Please let me know you're ok". The reply I got was like being hit by a truck.
"My husband has read all our chats, I've fucked up the one thing I truly cared about. I can't be a part of this friendship any more, I'm sorry. Please stay away, I really mean it".
I immediately replied asking if I could call her so we could talk and she just replied "no". I sent another couple off messages since then, to no reply. I couldn't deal with that. Over the past year, aside from falling in love with her and all that other stuff, she had become my best friend. The person I could speak to about anything at any time, and to go from messaging constantly every day to just complete silence just broke me. It feels like she's died or something. I sent her one last message last night. I've since deleted it, so I'm paraphrasing, but I basically said "I'm having a really hard time dealing with this. I can't just go from messaging you every day and seeing you all the time to losing you completely over night. If you think that trying to work things out with your husband is what's really best for you then I obviously want you to do that, and I I know you don't owe me anything, but I need more closure than that. It's too hard for me to just pretend you don't exist all of a sudden. Please just say anything to me, tell me how you're doing, how your new jobs is. Just something" to which she replied "I'm sorry you feel that way, try to find your own way to move past this and don't message me again".
So that's where I'm at now. I don't know what to do. I feel like my life has been ripped from me. Even though I never really had her, I've lost the woman I love in the space of a day. From constant messaging and chatting every day, to her telling me never to message her again. Again, I get why, but that doesn't make it any easier. It's like I'm going through a break up with something I wasn't in a relationship with. When she said things had to stop, that really sucked but I was ok with it because I still got to be friends with her, and hang out with her and talk to her. I was moving on in my own way, I was still in love with her but I was getting better at pushing that aside and just being friends. But now, I don't even have that. I've completely lost her. When she sent me that message on Monday, I just walked out of work and didn't go back until today. I spent the last 2 days drinking heavily, crying and having panic attacks. I'm back in work today, but I can't stop thinking about her. It's taking all my strength not to just call her and try to talk to her. Aside from the whole infidelity thing, I don't think I've done anything "wrong" in the sense that I haven't done anything to make her angry at me. I think that's the hardest part, those last 2 blunt messages. I can't read tone over text, so I've no idea if she's sad when she's sending them, or angry, or indifferent. I don't know anything. That's what's killing me. I feel like if I knew she was hurting over this too, that would make it easier for me, but in my head I just keep thinking she's angry and me and that makes it impossible to stop thinking about. I just want to try and smooth things over with her, but in the last message I sent her (Before she replied saying "don't message her again") I promised her it would be the last message I ever send her unless she wanted to speak to me, and I don't want to break that promise.
If you took the time to read all that, then I seriously thank you. I don't need anyone to say anything, I just needed to get everything off my chest to try and start moving on from all this.
Over a year ago now I started a new job. Nothing exciting, for a pretty small company looking to expand. The day I started, 2 other new people started along side me. One of this was a girl, we'll call her Sarah. I thought Sarah was cute, but I was in a relationship and she was married so I never thought of her as anything other than a colleague. We never spoke outside of work and I never thought of her outside of work unless it was for work reasons, but in work we got along really really well. We shared a desk and were basically in our own team, so we spoke to each other much more than we spoke to anyone else in the office. Around Halloween last year, I started developing a bit of a crush on her and started thinking about her a bit more, but nothing serious. I never even entertained the idea of doing anything about it or it leading to anything, because again we were both in long term relationships, and I just assumed it would pass eventually as crushes usually do.
Then the Christmas office party happened. The whole office went for dinner and drinks, management paid for everything. Later in the evening everyone was pretty drunk but all still in good spirits. At one point Sarah grabbed me by the hand and dragged me up to dance. There was a guy in a corner of the bar playing an acoustic guitar set, so we went over to him and started dancing. At one point she turned away from me to watch the guy play, so I just sort of stood there behind her drinking my pint. I'm not sure exactly when it started, but at a point I noticed that she had backed up into me and was rubbing her butt against my crotch. I sort of just froze, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't tell if she realised she was doing it or if she was just that drunk, but then she reached around and grabbed my hand and put it around her waist. I was shocked and again just sort of froze not really knowing what to do, then she turned around and pulled me in and kissed me. I kissed her back for a second or two then pulled away and said we shouldn't be doing this. She just looked up at me and gave me this smile that I can still see today and from that moment I was lost. I kissed her back. We spent most of the night kissing, in the bar, outside, in the lobby of her apartment building. She went upstairs to her apartment and I went home and that was that.
The next day I woke up to a message from her. We'd exchanged numbers pretty soon after we started working together but had never messaged each other before, it was really just in case of work stuff. We messaged for a bit about what had happened. I felt guilty and was really apologetic, but she seemed fine with it. Very much a "We were drunk, we only kissed, it's not a big deal, we're fine". I was relieved to hear her say that because she was the one that was married, so if she didn't think it was a big deal then that made me feel a bit better. That said, I'd never kissed anyone else in the entire 8 years I was with my partner, so I still felt guilty about that. I never told her, but about a week later I broke up with her. Not because of the kiss, the was more of a symptom than a cause. Things weren't great between us for a long time so I decided it was time to end it. I moved out and that was pretty much that.
Since that first message after the Christmas party, we began messaging constantly. All day every day, sometimes even in work while we were sitting next to each other. Around 2 weeks after the Christmas party, Sarah decided that she wanted to try and organise another round of drinks as there was a local beer market happening. I, sort of jokingly, suggested that it might be more fun if just the two of us went and she agreed. So the plan was for us to go for a few drinks on Friday after work, just the two of us. On Thursday, she came in to work and was clearly sick. Her daughter had just gotten over the chicken pox, and as Sarah had never had them as a child, she seemed to have picked them up. No spots or anything yet, just feverish and stuff. She worked from home on Friday and while she still wanted to go for drinks, didn't want to go out into a public place with chicken pox in case she spread them around so I suggested I grab a bottle of wine and call round to her apartment (Her husband had flown to a different city that day to spend Christmas with his mum, Sarah was due to join him the next day).
Round at her apartment we spent hours chatting, went through a couple of bottles of wine, and ended up kissing again. I think we both knew it was going to happen and we both wanted it to happen, but were just scared because of the obvious messiness of the situation. I decided I should go, because even though I wanted to kiss her I still felt guilty about it. About 5 minutes after I left she messaged me telling me how wet she was. I was, again, shocked but it was also incredibly hot. I told her that it sucked that I had to wait until I had to get home to masturbate and she replied saying she didn't have to wait and was about to start. After that, things really escalated between us.
We messaged constantly over the Christmas break, and when she came back and we were both in work, things started really heating up between us. We'd make excuses to go out for drinks at least once a week, a couple of times a week I'd drive her up to her daughters daycare and drop her off. Both were just excuses to sit and make out. We started sending each other sexually explicit texts in work. She'd go into the bathroom, take a photo of herself topless then wait until she was back at the desk before sending it to me just so she could see my reaction. We talked about sex constantly, what we wanted to do to each other, the fantasises we had about each other. We'd send nudes, videos of ourselves masturbating, mutual masturbation over video call when we could. We'd go into the bathrooms of the office, literally about 8ft away from our desk, to make out. One day we went for a walk to the shop on our lunch, and about halfway through the walk when no one was around she opened her coat to reveal that she wasn't wearing a top or bra underneath. It was all incredibly hot, and very exciting and everything was great for a few months.
Eventually, I started to realise that I was properly falling in love with her. I didn't know at the time if she felt the same, I had always gotten the vibe that from her this was purely sexual. But, it became clear over time that she had feelings for me too. Maybe not love, but she openly admitted that she had really strong feelings for me past just a crush. We talked constantly, openly about everything. I talked to her about things that even my partner of 8 years didn't know. We made each other laugh constantly, we just completely got each other. To use her words, we just really clicked" She'd talk to me about her husband, and occasionally mention things like him saying that the only reason they were still married was because they had a kid together. She talked about how she loved him, but she had loved other people in the past more than she loves him. I tried to not ask her too much about her relationship with her husband, both because I didn't feel like it was appropriate and also because I just didn't want to talk to the girl I was falling in love with about her husband. But from what she did say about him I always got the impression that they married because she fell pregnant and they felt like that was the right thing to do. Her especially, she comes from a background where having a child outside of marriage is very much looked down upon.
She tried to call things off a few times, not so much because she felt guilty, but because she was scared of her husband finding out. But, we always ended up back seeing each other again after a day or two. We just couldn't keep away from each other, made more difficult by the fact we spent 40 hours a week sitting next to each other. A couple of months ago, she made it clear that she really wanted to stop. I'd gotten her a card for a specific occasion, and her husband found it. He already knew I existed, and I think he was already a little jealous and suspicious of me, but he found the card and the note I'd written in it and called her out on it. There was nothing sexual or even romantic in the card, but the fact that I'd gotten her a card at all was enough for him challenge her. She denied that anything was happening, but then made it clear to me that things had to stop. I obviously didn't want to because at this point I was completely in love with her, but I understood. We still messaged as friends, but pretty much everything else had stopped. We still flirted, and on a couple of occasions we sexted but nothing physical happened between us since.
About 2 months ago now, she left the company we worked at. She got a much better job and although I was pretty down that I wasn't going to be seeing her every day, I was stoked for her getting a better position for much higher pay. Between leaving our company and starting a new one, there was about a one month gap where she was out of work. The day after she left, I called round to her apartment during my lunch hour and we chatted for ages about her leaving, what it mean, how it made us feel. It ended with me trying to kiss her, and her asking me not to. I can't really explain why I did. In the moment, I know she wanted me to kiss her, but she didn't at the same time. It's hard to explain. I know she wanted me to kiss her though, she hasn't outright denied that. Around 2 weeks ago, we were meeting up a lot. Her husbands mother was over and staying with them for a few week, her husband still had work during the day so she was looking for any excuse to leave the house. We went for pints, spent entire days together (I took PTO from work) and things were nice. One day she messaged me in the evening saying she felt really lonely after leaving me that day, and I felt the same. I know I was still in love with her, those feelings went away, and I was starting to feel that she still felt the same way about me.
Last Friday we went out as a group for drinks. A couple of people from the office, her and one other guy who had left for another company a couple of weeks prior. It was a good night, nothing happened, everyone just chatted and went home early enough. The next day we were messaging as normal, until some time in the late afternoon. I sent her a message and she didn't reply to it all evening. I didn't think much of it at the time, but when she still hadn't replied the next morning I thought that was weird. Normally she messages me pretty much as soon as she gets up. I set her a message in the afternoon asking if everything was ok, and she read it but didn't reply. I sent her another message that evening wishing her good luck in her new job (which she was starting the next day), and the next morning she still hadn't replied. At this point I was getting genuinely worried that something had happened to her. I sent her another message (Around 7:30am on Monday morning, the last message I'd received from her was around 3pm on Saturday) just saying "Please let me know you're ok". The reply I got was like being hit by a truck.
"My husband has read all our chats, I've fucked up the one thing I truly cared about. I can't be a part of this friendship any more, I'm sorry. Please stay away, I really mean it".
I immediately replied asking if I could call her so we could talk and she just replied "no". I sent another couple off messages since then, to no reply. I couldn't deal with that. Over the past year, aside from falling in love with her and all that other stuff, she had become my best friend. The person I could speak to about anything at any time, and to go from messaging constantly every day to just complete silence just broke me. It feels like she's died or something. I sent her one last message last night. I've since deleted it, so I'm paraphrasing, but I basically said "I'm having a really hard time dealing with this. I can't just go from messaging you every day and seeing you all the time to losing you completely over night. If you think that trying to work things out with your husband is what's really best for you then I obviously want you to do that, and I I know you don't owe me anything, but I need more closure than that. It's too hard for me to just pretend you don't exist all of a sudden. Please just say anything to me, tell me how you're doing, how your new jobs is. Just something" to which she replied "I'm sorry you feel that way, try to find your own way to move past this and don't message me again".
So that's where I'm at now. I don't know what to do. I feel like my life has been ripped from me. Even though I never really had her, I've lost the woman I love in the space of a day. From constant messaging and chatting every day, to her telling me never to message her again. Again, I get why, but that doesn't make it any easier. It's like I'm going through a break up with something I wasn't in a relationship with. When she said things had to stop, that really sucked but I was ok with it because I still got to be friends with her, and hang out with her and talk to her. I was moving on in my own way, I was still in love with her but I was getting better at pushing that aside and just being friends. But now, I don't even have that. I've completely lost her. When she sent me that message on Monday, I just walked out of work and didn't go back until today. I spent the last 2 days drinking heavily, crying and having panic attacks. I'm back in work today, but I can't stop thinking about her. It's taking all my strength not to just call her and try to talk to her. Aside from the whole infidelity thing, I don't think I've done anything "wrong" in the sense that I haven't done anything to make her angry at me. I think that's the hardest part, those last 2 blunt messages. I can't read tone over text, so I've no idea if she's sad when she's sending them, or angry, or indifferent. I don't know anything. That's what's killing me. I feel like if I knew she was hurting over this too, that would make it easier for me, but in my head I just keep thinking she's angry and me and that makes it impossible to stop thinking about. I just want to try and smooth things over with her, but in the last message I sent her (Before she replied saying "don't message her again") I promised her it would be the last message I ever send her unless she wanted to speak to me, and I don't want to break that promise.
If you took the time to read all that, then I seriously thank you. I don't need anyone to say anything, I just needed to get everything off my chest to try and start moving on from all this.
